Endless: Ballad of the Titans
by Manzikert Troy
Summary: In a world rife with betrayal and war, he had become both the planet's Savior, and its Scourge. Follow Manzikert, Achea's veritable military Titan, and his companions Thorn and Dilante on their journey to save the world from destruction and themselves.
1. Titan in a Broken Home

**Disclaimer: All characters appearing within this story are creations of myself and three friends -- Shelbi Noffsinger, Dian Nyobe, and Lonijae Simonton. All locations within this story are also of our creation.**

Under the pallid shower of the moon on a balmy summer night, a titan among men folded his arms over his chest. A gentle breeze feathered through his crimson mane, noble and prideful like that of a lion in its taper to the small of his back. Dried dirt kicked up in waves, the brown particles discontent with their sedentary existence, and catching whispers of wind like flights to the next settlement.

Behind this titan, in the distance as it were, was a line of trees, a scattering of trunks and shrubs, of greenery and scurrying creatures. And across from him stood fast a man and a woman -- his subordinates and friends -- Dilante and Thornika.

Thorn was tall, with long, toned legs that wound up and into her femininely sculpted hips like the roads to the Holy Grail. A narrow waist, enticing in its curvature, hid beneath a black camisol and a denim jacket. Her raven hair fell in cascades over her shoulder, and framed a milky face that touted its own beauty in her very countenance. And as the coup de grace, chilling blue eyes, like icicles, stabbed at the visible world, seemingly daunting everything and everyone that stood in her way.

Dilante looked to be the average man, at least in terms of stature. Shaggy black hair ruffled in the wind, and sharp green eyes absorbed the world around him. A black track jacket hung loosely against him, and jeans sat over simple sneakers. His expression, Dilante always being the one for levity, held an almost comical sarcasm to it by default. He rested his hands in his pockets aloofly and bobbed his head as if to music.

The titan, Manzikert, grinned competitively. Silver eyes brilliantly illuminated his head, set behind the foreground of his mane. He was the tallest of them, the crown of his head scraping six and a half feet. Evenly defined, his lean musculature belied the strength that resided within, and eagerly awaited to be released from, every muscle fiber and striation of his body. Set upon his shoulders, as much as a restraint as an article of clothing, was a cumbersome black mantle, complete with a battle-tattered cloak. Rustled burgundy pants covered his legs, and brown boots provided ankle support. And as a show of his rank, a golden brooch clipped to the on his chest -- The Nemean Lion, a creature of mythology that was considered his family's ancestral spirit.

"The two of you haven't fatigued already, have you?" Manzikert goaded. "I should say that this would be a poor show of might, especially combined, if you surrender with such a pitious effort."

Dilante shrugged, threw a sly grin to Thorn, who much to his surprise, was already in the course of a beeline toward Manzikert. _Man, she's gonna get us killed one day_, he said to himself. Then, despite his own reservations about such a hasty offensive, Dilante sprang into action as well.

Thorn had already leapt daringly into the air, her scythe in tow, to rain down on Manzikert with a swift strike. A silver gleam, the screech of metal, and the vampire found herself halted in midflight. She had seen the captain (though by no means did she consider him to be her leader) perform supernatural feats of strength and reaction, but never before had his senses been acute enough to catch the pole of her scythe in the zenith of its assault.

In an ill-advised choice, Dilante, assuming he now had the opportunity to strike while Manzikert was distracted, dashed until he had come in range, and opted for a sweep of the legs, but before he could drop to perform the kick, he felt the weight of Thorn crashing against his body like a projectile. The two of them tumbled like stray weeds in the desert, tangled together, through the dirt, while Manzikert stifled chuckles at their misfortune.

At last they came to a stop, covered with dirt and grass stains, and picked themselves apart from each other. Dilante sat on his butt, rubbing his temples, while Thorn pulled herself together and banished her otherworldly scythe to its interdimensional home. They glanced at each other -- Thorn with pursed lips and Dilante with a detached smile, then both cast slighting sights on the third present.

"It was supposed to be a spar," Thorn complained viciously, ice in her words.

"Not a human shield exhibition," Dilante interjected.

Thorn spat angrily, "I'm not a human."

Manzikert interloped before another argument on Thorn's choice of species could ignite, "Never mind the spar." He cracked his neck, relieving the constant tension, and strided toward them, settling a few feet away before speaking again. "We've been charged with a new operation that will begin tomorrow."

Dilante griped now, preferring to give himself time to recuperate unlike his bulky friend and the vampire, who had regenerative properties anyway. "Aww man we just came off of a mission. Can't we ever just, you know, take a break?"

"Aww poor little human," Thorn taunted, shooting Dilante a snide smirk.

"Bickering children," sighed Manzikert, shielding the words under his breath.

"What'd you call me you prick?" hissed Thorn, stepping toward him threateningly. "Did you just call me a child?"

Dilante backed away for fear of a feminine explosion. He'd learned in just the few months that he'd been traveling with the pair that although Hell has no wrath like a woman scorned, no woman had wrath like the vampire Thorn. He covered his mouth with a hand, feigning a cough to conceal his laughter.

"No," Manzikert solidly answered. "I believe 'bickering' preceded 'children,' the plural form of child, and thus, singularly, I referred to you as a 'bickering child.'"

Silence. Stillness. And then a flash of pale skin as Thorn pounced on her officer like a cougar on its prey, slashing and chomping at him as effectively as she could, but due to Manzikert's overwhelming strength and advantage in reach, he staved her off for the first few moments of her raging assault, at least until they had hit the dirt.

Dilante watched, wide-eyed and still laughing, as the two of them wrestled about in the dirt like children over a piece of candy. _And he called _us_ children, _mused the tracker. He pulled his from his pocket and gave it a glance to find that it was well past his time to return.

He shrugged, "So err, you guys keep wrestling, I have shit to do."

Thorn palmed, to the best of her abilites when comparing his large head to her small hand, Manzikert's face and held him to the dirt, while he wrapped an engulfing hand around her throat. They paused, gave each other a fleeting connection of the eyes, then rose from the dirt separately and dusted themselves off.

"I suppose then that I should make this debriefing rather brief," Manzikert surmised, ignoring the cold glare that he received from Thorn. "An Ambassador from the nation Alexandria will be arriving tonight in Aria, our capital. Alexandria is a small nation, but it has collaborated with Achea during war many times in the past, and is one of our premier trading partners. It is our responsibility to escort the Ambassador, Mrs. Talia Masanon, from Aria to The Festival of the Summer Sun, where she is slated to engage in a press conference. It is an honor to be given this assignment, which will last us approximately three days, and I will not tolerate tardiness or disrespect in the slightest manner."

Thorn scoffed, turned toward the moon. At one point she had been an official, the director of the Coven's Defensive Military Procedures. Now she was taking orders from nothing more than an oversized human with too much time on his hands. At least Dilante, for what it was worth, offered her some real company and a few laughs now and again, as opposed to Manzikert who could never seem to pull his head out of his work long enough to smell coffee in the kitchen.

Dilante pursed his lips, irritated with all of the effort he had to exert just to complete his personal assignment. But, as always, an arch of his shoulders dismissed just about anything that distracted him from his most cherished of all possessions: calmness under any circumstances. Well, that and his hair.

A twinge of guilt racked Manzikert's body, tugged at his heartstrings like the keys of a piano. He shuddered, and repressed certain memories back to the recesses of his mind, where they belonged to stay.

"Everybody get some rest. I will see you bright and early." His voice was weakened, removed from the strength that it had exuded only moments ago.

"I'm sure I'll sleep real well, Prick," Thorn jabbed. "I'm a vampire -- NOCTURNAL -- meaning that I'm awake at night and sleep during the day." She continued to grumble, resigned to her diurnal fate as long as she traveled with the two men.

Without a word Dilante darted off into the forest, vanishing into the blending colors of the night.

"You've permission to take leave, Thornika," Manzikert feebly uttered, feet carrying him toward his house. Still he carried himself with a pride unfathomable, despite his apparently languid state.

"Like I need permission from you," she spat again, then scampered toward the trees herself, and in a single leap, became one with the benighted world as if she had been its child since birth.

Alone, the titan took himself into his self-constructed cabin. He had summoned Thorn and Dilante to the clearing where he resided, less as a form of training, and more because he had simply desired some company, temporary and belligerent as it was.

His house, as it could hardly be considered a home, was sparsely furbished and reflected his ascetic, military mindset. From his five years of official service to the Achean Imperial Military, and for the profession which he had all but perfected, Manzikert had amassed quite the fortune, but meted it for the most part to charities and public works projects, with the exemption of the antiques that he collected such as his wardrobe, armoire, and bathroom mirror. But even these reflected his lack of modern materialism.

He passed through the small kitchen and entered the singular bedroom of the house on the opposite side of the thin wall. In the center of the square, immaculate room was a king sized bed in a cherrywood frame of Manzikert's own craft. Quilts passed through the generations of his family set neatly folded at the foot of it, and two pillows rested at diagonals against the headboard. Manzikert shed his clothes, hanging his mantle-cloak as usual and leaving it beside his freshly pressed black suits in the wardrobe. He headed for the shower, rinsed lather from his hair, and stared at himself in the mirror.

Gilded with horns at each corner, the old sheet of silvered glass reciprocated hauntingly his consuming stare. Deep inside those silver eyes, beyond the pupils and the anatomical jargon, rested a beast, a behemoth that yearned to be released. With a gentle finger he pulled at the bottom of his eye lid, revealing the veins and capillaries relaxed on his sclera. At least for the night, that horrible monster rested, and wasn't a threat to himself, or the world.

Then came bed. The titan rolled back the comforter, reached for a quilt, and tucked himself away in the night. The terrors would accost him, rack his body with vivid pain as if being abused while paralyzed, petrified in his own body, but that was a worthwhile sacrifice to keep the beast tamed...


	2. The Difference Between Good and Evil

**Disclaimer: All characters appearing within this story are creations of myself and my friends -- Shelbi Noffsinger, Dian Nyobe, Glenn, and Lonijae Simonton. All locations within this story are also of our creation.**

Dilante stood beside himself, back rested against a tree. His head bobbed right, then left, then right -- a generally symoblistic gesture for indecision. No longer was he sure of himself, not in the sense of self-consciousness or deprecation, but in the sense that he straddled the very fragile and very vague barrier between good and evil. It was a simple choice fundamentally: do good deeds and only good will come unto oneself. The conundrum that the tracker faced, caught between a rock and a hard place, was that he couldn't discern good from evil anymore; it had become as blurred as a flock of birds against the backdrop of the everlasting black parchment that sealed the world together.

He crossed his arms, jacket stretching around his shoulders, and tapped his foot in the dirt impatiently. Under the canopy of the forest, only the thinnest lines of pale yellow light sneaked through the foliage from the sphere resting in its nightly apex. _I'm the man right?_ he pondered. _So why's everything all...confusing now? It's just another job, like any other._

A rustle of leaves heralded the arrival of another man. That was no phantom whisper of the wind whistling between the bark of trees and sweeping underbrush from its dried and lonely position at the dirt; the pitter patter of fleet footsteps on creaking branches and the swish of a ratty maroon scarf could mean only one man, the man on whom Dilante had been waiting.

"Took you long enough," Dilante hushed, emerald eyes sharply focused on his counterpart under the guise of darkness. Each of them was a veteran in their field, in silence and stealth, and each knew that to aggress upon the other could very well mean death, or worse -- detection.

The Scarfed Man tapped the side of a whirring visor that had been illuminating his path. It was a piece of technology that only the most advanced research departments could have devised, complete with four separate settings to enhance awareness and reaction time. To accompany his progressively metal appearance, the Scarfed Man bore also a cybernetic gauntlet set into his right arm, and a pair of seemingly simple ankle braces wrapped around his legs.

At any rate, the visor disengaged, the four slits which had previously afforded him an almost demonic expression faded, and the Scarfed Man lifted it to more naturally view Dilante in the darkness. "I had other negotiations and matters," he coldly replied.

"Eh. Nunna that has to deal with me. So what's on your mind that you wanted me to come out here in the middle of the night?" Dilante shifted his weight from one foot to the other as a squirrel scampered by with acorns for its family.

"I need you to expedite the operation," the Scarfed Man shot back tersely. "No more of this lollygagging. Your stage of the operation must be com--"

"Did you _really_ just say the word lollygagging? I mean, I don't gag on lollies alright? So don't make me sound like I'm a homo, 'cause that sounds really gay. _Just sayin'_..."

The Scarfed Man sneered. "Like I was saying, your stage of the operation must be completed for the rest of our project to continue."

"Not my project," Dilante shrugged indifferently. He glanced at the shoulders of his jacket, which had creased from his arch, and flattened it before perfecting a strand of his hair that had been caught in an errant gust.

Anger simmered in the Scarfed Man's eyes, frustration with Dilante's rogue attitude, but there was nothing to remedy such disdain -- at least until the part had been properly played. "You're a part of this too, Dilante."

"Nah. You just think I am.

"Are you an actor now?"

He grinned deviously, "Depends. Do you think I'd win an Oscar?"

"Is my satisfaction not your number one priority?"

"Again with the homosexuality? You're starting to creep me out, guy. Maybe I should just inch away from this one."

The Scarfed Man stepped, malice shown in his motion, "Don't make me kill you, old friend."

Dilante stepped defiantly against his friend. "Even if you had the **balls**," a hushed, emphatic tone. "You don't have the **skill**."

The Scarfed Man aligned himself, shoulder to shoulder, with a man whom he had once considered to be his brother. In a vicious voice, almost dripping with venom, he cut his eyes to Dilante and recited an all too familiar oath, "Do _not_ Cross the Assassin. Do _not_ Deceive thy Brother. Do _not_ Wound the Hand. Do _not_ Disrespect the Blade." He lowered the visor, tapped in a rhythmic configuration of beeps, and in no more than a dozen sudden strides, sank into the darkness of the world.

"Do not Deceive thy Brother," Dilante repeated to himself almost silently. "Is Manz my brother...or is Brimstone?" _And either way,_ he continued in silence, agile legs lifting him above the treeline with ease. _Which one is good, and which one is evil?_

_**XXXXXXXXXXXXX**_

Thorn took another hit from her silver flask. It didn't seem like anything really affected her that much anymore: pain, happiness, alcohol. All she really ever felt was angry. Some people claim to be depressed or numb, but not Thorn. Every day was another day on the edge for her, another day awaiting the straw that would snap the camel's back.

Most mortals struggled to deal with the purpose of life, the reason for their being. Why else would they have jotted down the Gospels of gods on high that they had never met? Why else would they worship idols they couldn't so much as see? Or maybe they believed that their gods were omnipresent -- always everywhere at all times.

But to her that didn't make any sense. It was all, in her slurred speech, "_Illogical bullshit."_ Irrelevant. She had been walking the planet for near to three centuries, and hadn't seen hide nor hair of a god, any god, any supreme being that gave one or two craps about whether or not his or her children suffered. Parents tend to care when their children are hurt or in danger or at war with each other, so obviously, in Thorn's rationale at least, there was no god, because no righteous god would ever allow her to come to such a horrible low in her already tragic life.

She sat at a black table, iron with a miniaturized Italian fresco. She recognized it, and although at one point she would have smiled with sweet nostalgia, reminiscing about the vineyard upon which she had been raised along with her twin sister Ivy; now it made her spit in disgust. Bottom line: she was bitter.

Scurrying from one table to the next were scores of busy servers taking drink and food orders, flirting with customers, and trying to earn a few big tips before the bistro closed. Inside the city gates, the streetlights and skyline dominated the world, scraping off a couple flakes of Heaven. The normally innumerable stars vanished against a mauve sky artificially illuminated with neon in the slums, and incandescent and florescent in the uppity parts of town.

On the streets, traffic had come to a midnight gridock, what with so many people trying to speed home to prepare for work in the morning, or smashing into corners and side panels while on a binge. The sidewalks were filled to capacity with gaggles of nameless, faceless civilians -- some thin, some thick, some tall, some short, all human.

Thorn found her solace in the bottom of the flask. The nearly Moonshine-proof whiskey she had been quaffing like the last drink she'd ever have burned her throat with a hot, comforting bitterness. It was no different than Thorn herself -- sour and angry for being caged for so many years. Then, when it was finally released into the mouth of the world, it didn't know how to behave and scorned anything that came into its path, made it pay for punishing it in the first place. The whiskey was her best friend -- at least until she had drunk it all.

With a sour face she slammed the butt of the flask against the fresco tabletop and cracked its surface. Eyes flew to her direction like moths to a lightbulb, but her twisted hiss turned them away like a cat from a swimming pool. It had been so long since she'd fed. There was no particular rule of conduct in the military guidelines stating that she couldn't feed, simply that "unnecessary bloodshed will not be tolerated."

The guidelines, however, said nothing of vampires, or their _need_ for bloodshed, their **lust** for it. To Thorn, the ends justified the means and suffice it to say, she was only searching for _necessary_ bloodshed when she caught the eye of a young male server with a frosted blond coiff. She winked at him; his face turned red. A few moments later, with his apron shed and his face washed of the sweat and salt that settled from the humidity, the young man took Thorn's hand gently and led her around to the back of the bistro, to a staircase that led to the velvet rope dining area of the roof. Thorn smirked knowingly behind his oblivious head.

He led her to an obscure corner and jimmied open the grate of a broad, curving air duct to give them some sense of privacy. When he pressed his lips to Thorn's harshly, even she had to admit that she hadn't expected him to be so skilled with his tongue.

_What a waste, _the vampire thought. _But there'll be others._

She continued to let him invade the privacy of her mouth, their tongues sliding together in a moist exchange of dominance. Her small, pallid hands with intricately dancing fingers pranced their way to the back of his head, sending shivers down his spine with every contact of her flesh against his. It was almost an electric pulse, the nuances of their bodies molding together and mouths wanting for more, but there was more important pulses on Thorn's mind than the one of their false passion.

As his hands roamed to her waist, then higher and cupped her chest, then around and reached for the hook of her bra beneath the camisol, every beat of his heart jumped, thudded in her ears like a steel drum. She yearned for the hot spurts of crimson that would fill her stomach with ecstasy that not even whiskey could rival; it was all just a matter of timing.

She smirked against his lips. Eyes wide, the server felt his back smack against the wall just as he had been distracted enough to successfully separated Thorn's bra. It fell from her shirt to her feet, and he fell to her seductive ploy like a dog to its master. Head jerked back so that his shocked brown eyes were glued to the sky, the served attempted to scream, thrash, anything to save him from the voracious vampire that had already, and all too effortlessly, rent his throat asunder.

Blood trickled from the corners of both Thorn's lips and those of her victim, though to be sure, he was gurgling, drowning on his own life. Thorn basked in the radiant heat of his being, all of it streaming from him freely, with no ebb to its flow. She spat the last chunk of flesh between her teeth to the blood pooling on the roof, and shook her head at the young man dying at her feet, clawing for life.

She grinned maliciously, "That's why lust is one of the Seven Deadly Sins." She snatched her blood soaked bra from the saturated surface, lifted her camisol and clipped it cavalierly. Then, the vampire planted her foot on the parapet of the building, and performed a cinematic swan dive toward the patrons of the bistro, much to their incredulity, before fading like a wraith into an air of shadows.


End file.
